The UnAmericans: Stories (17 page)

T
HE MORNING
after the FBI guys visit, I’m outside Menick’s when I see a boy leaving the hardware store next door, balancing boxes in one arm and paper sacks in the other. He must be my age, though he’s almost as tall as my father, his light brown hair slicked back and clean. When he steps onto the sidewalk, the top box falls from his arms. Nails plink on the concrete and roll into the gutter.

“Here,” I say, bending down beside him. “Let me give you a hand.”

“Thanks,” he says. I scoop up the nails and spill them into his open palms. For just a moment, the boy’s gaze wanders down to my legs, skirt sliding above my bare knees as I squat on the hot pavement. Our eyes meet. He blushes. I smile, making no attempt to pull the skirt over my thighs. I don’t know where that flash of boldness came from, but I can tell he likes it. He stands up and continues down the street. At the corner he turns around and looks at me once more, and at that second I can sense a tiny bit of my life beginning to happen.

T
HERE
’
S A NEW
woman tossing her amber curls around my father’s booth, brushing herself up against the Formica, overwhelming the table with the carnationy smell of a beauty parlor. I cough, uncapping my pen to take their order.

“You know what I want.” My father’s voice has a dreamy edge. “And she’ll have the meatloaf and a Coca-Cola.”

“Light on the ice,” the woman calls out after I’ve almost reached the kitchen. I turn around and see her cross her legs, stretching out forever like the boulevards downtown. She is wearing, of all things, pants.

“She’s sweet,” she whispers to my father, loud enough for all of Menick’s to hear.

“What’s her story?” I ask Alan, soon as I’m out of earshot.

“Gladys?”

“No, the other woman in my father’s booth. Yeah, Gladys.”

“My pop says she was a big deal organizer back east but that she moved here after her divorce.” Alan says the word
divorce
the same way we talk about the black neighborhoods below Robertson: reverentially, excitedly, but a place we wouldn’t dare wander after dinner. “But more important, he says she’s a nice lady, that she’s . . .” He pauses, eyes flicking nervously around the restaurant, then whispers, like a complete dramatic, “That she’s committed to the cause.”

A
WEEK PASSES
and nothing changes. Gladys continues to sit in my father’s booth, inching closer to him, ordering plates of meatloaf. I’ve never seen a woman like her: wearing pants like it’s no one’s business but her own, but with enough rouge smeared on her cheeks to remind us all she’s female. “You’ve been spacey lately,” Alan says today, moving a rag across the counter in quick strokes. “What’s with you?” He looks up at me, waiting for me to lift my arms so he can wipe that spot as well. I don’t. Gladys catches my eye from across the room and smiles, but I look away. I raise one hand off the counter and the print of lines looks almost permanent, but then Alan pushes the rag right over it. The remnant of my handprint blurs into the wetness and then slowly disappears. The fan still blows dust.

I’m serving up a short stack when the boy walks past the windows. I take off my apron, grab my purse and run outside. “Hey,” I call.

He turns around. His arms are filled with more paper sacks from the hardware store.

“You don’t go to Marshall High with me, do you?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “Hoover.”

I should have guessed, with his seersucker shirt and Bass Weejuns. I wonder if he’ll excuse himself—everyone knows half the Marshall kids’ parents are in the Party, and this past winter three Hoover boys chased Alan home after school, shouting
Pink-o Jew, Pink-o Jew
, then beat him to the ground and stuffed fistfuls of dirt in his mouth, right from his own garden. He wouldn’t go to school for a week after that. I had to bring his homework every afternoon, and a tray of juice and toast, as if he were sick, rather than simply terrified of whatever was hovering outside. But this boy continues to stand here, like he has no intention of walking away. “Don’t you have a hardware store over by you?”

“I like it here better.” He looks down the avenue at Leo the druggist locking up for lunch; the cluster of wives outside the bakery, staring up at the clouds and clutching their hats in the breeze.

“Listen,” I say. “I’ve got my own opinion, but like what you like.” I eye the sacks. “What are you building?”

“You really want to know?”

I cock my hip. “I asked, didn’t I?”

“A fallout shelter.”

“No kidding,” I say. “Can I take a look?” And in the exact moment it takes him to shift the bags from one hand and back to the other, as if considering every one of my words, I’m already leading him down the street, as if I know the way. After a few blocks, the lawns and houses begin to expand. Wooden fences appear, protecting swing sets and rosebushes. Even the smell here is different: like newly mown lawn, laced with honeysuckle. The boy’s house is at the end of a cul-de-sac and has a red fence, dark red like the booths at Menick’s. He unlatches it and leads me into the backyard.

Nearly the entire yard has been consumed by a hole in the ground. “Some guys with a backhoe came last month to make the hole,” the boy says, “and then me and my dad got to work. Every day we’ve been mixing mortar and setting the cinderblocks, and yesterday we bought the floorboards.” He lights a lantern and we climb down a ladder. Inside it’s empty except for pipes and sheets of metal leaning against the blocks, and it doesn’t smell musty like I would have thought, but dank and earthy. “I know it doesn’t look like much,” the boy says. “But when we’re done building the inside, we’ll put in fold-up bunks and paint the walls some color my mother picks out.”

“Won’t it be creepy staying here for days, not even seeing the sun?” I ask.

“Well,” the boy says, “it’s better than dying.”

“You in there?” calls a voice from above.

I look up at the sky and see a dark cutout shape of a woman peering down at us.

“Thank God you got more supplies,” the woman says as I follow the boy up the ladder. Her voice has a perkiness that makes me nervous. She’s wearing a pale blue sweater set and her hair is cut into a harsh pageboy, clipped right below the ears. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”

I realize I never told the boy my name, and have no idea who he is. “I’m Judy,” I say, sticking out my hand.

“Glad you came for a visit,” she says, but her stiff smile makes me want to run home and iron all my clothes. “I wish you were seeing the shelter when it’s finished, though, I know now it looks just like a gaping hole. I’ll be honest, the best thing about it is more storage space. You know Hal can’t throw anything out? He still has board games he never plays, swim trunks that no longer fit—”

“
Mother
.”

“So I say to Hal, fine, take all those things out here so my house stops looking like a junk shop,” and before she can say anything else, Hal leads me out to the sidewalk. No one’s ever accused me of shyness, but with this boy, I can’t put a sentence together. Hal looks happy and confused and a little afraid of me, as if he isn’t sure how, or even when, I appeared.

“Hal?” his mother calls from inside.

“I should go.” I can already predict what his mother thinks of me, a girl willing to crawl into the unfinished shelter of a boy she barely knows.

“Let me walk you home,” he says, and I reach for his arm.

I imagine us strolling through the streets as the lawns shrink and fade, up the steps of my duplex where the FBI men may be lurking, my father’s voice echoing down the block. “No,” I say, and it’s only when I let go of Hal that I see the pale dots my fingers made against his sunburned skin. “But don’t worry, I’ll see you soon enough.”

I
UNLOCK THE
door to a dark, silent house. On the kitchen table are a bowl of pistachio shells and an ashtray of stubbed-out cigars: no note from my father about where he went, nothing. For a moment I wonder if he’s in more trouble than he’s letting on, and I have no idea what to do. Then he walks inside with the newspaper tucked under his arm.

“Where were you?” I say.

“I should ask you the same thing, cutting out of work today.” He flicks on the radio and sits down. “Any uninvited guests tonight?”

“I didn’t see them.”

“Not even across the street?”

I glance at my father to see if I should be nervous, but his eyes are on the paper. “Should I be worried or are you just talking?”

“Worry about those fools?” He taps the sofa. “Relax a minute.”

I take a seat, watching my father’s eyes dart across the page. The radio, for once, is comforting: loud enough to absorb our silence but too quiet for my father to make out actual words and yell back at the news, wagging a finger in the air. Then he sets down the paper and walks into the kitchen. I hear the icebox open and close, and when he reappears he just stands in the doorway, cradling his beer, turning it around in his hands like he’s forgotten what to do with it. Then he says softly, “You’ve been acting funny. This about Gladys?”

This is so unlike him that I know Gladys is on the sidelines, nudging him to ask, and I can’t help it: I wonder if a new woman could be good for us. How comforting to have things back in order like when my mother was sick and the Party women took charge: dinner foil-wrapped and ready to slide into the oven, the sounds of a bridge game and neighborhood gossip rising and falling in the background as I drifted to sleep.

“Do you love her?” I blurt.

“No,” he says. “But I like her.”

“But do you think you
could
? Someday, I mean.”

He stares at me, as if genuinely registering my presence for the first time. “You want to know the truth?”

I nod and he sits back down and says, “Sometimes we’ll be out together, eating a meal or something, and I’ll be watching her mouth move and hear nothing she’s saying and feel like the saddest man in the restaurant. Sometimes I wonder if I was wired to love only your mother. But then I keep thinking, okay. Now’s the time for me to be back in my life.”

I’ve never heard him talk this way to anyone—certainly not to me—and part of me knows to let everything fall silent before the mood turns dangerously dark. I can already tell I’m wandering into mapless territory, where I can so easily step over some invisible border and start a whole new war, just like that. But I have too many questions. “Was Mom your first?” I say. “Love, I mean.”

He shakes his head. “But after her, the others seemed like rehearsals.”

“She was pretty, wasn’t she?”

He looks up, startled. “You don’t remember?”

I’ve spent my whole life trying to remember, I want to say.

Instead I say: “I was five.”

“You were five,” he says, as if it’s only now occurring to him. “No,” he says, slowly. “She wasn’t very pretty. Sometimes, at certain angles, she looked a little crazy. Like all her features, her long nose and pointy chin, had no business being together on one face. But then she’d look at you head-on and dazzle you.” He smiles, as if he can see something on the wall beyond me, some bright and endless reel of images, that will always—always—be invisible to me. “She had such a presence at the meetings. She knew how to be the most powerful person in the group by saying so little. You’d be talking to a room packed with people and she’d just stare at you, and all at once you’d feel drunk and oafish and full of hot air, even when you’d had nothing to drink.”